The dark side of the office email

SciTech News / 27 August 2013, 6:00pm

DAVID HEPWORTH

Gmail, with more than 425 million accounts worldwide, was one of the first free email services to embrace TLS.

London - When I edited Smash Hits in the 1980s, we had a brilliant advertising manager. He liked to talk. He picked up the phone and talked to clients. We heard every word he said. But, in two years of working with him, I never saw him write anything down.

Offices were noisier then. Typewriters clacked, phones rang and fax machines pleaded, while the biggest personalities built their phone conversations into extravagant one-man shows. It’s a world away from the tappety tappety cubicles where today’s media drones sit e-mailing each other in a language designed to neutralise the power of personality, avoid conflict and above all cover their own backs.

Email is now the most popular form of communication between office workers.

Email would be a good servant but a rotten master if only for the way it reduces learning opportunities. Newcomers used to learn from listening to an experienced editor or salesman performing their job in public. When people got in touch with others via phone, a smart junior who was prepared to pick up an unanswered phone and offer to take a message quickly got a reputation as someone to watch.

You had a picture of everyone you dealt with because you spoke to them or even met them face to face. More recently, I have written for one magazine for four years without once speaking to the person who commissioned me. This year, I had a 20-email exchange with a PR over a complex arrangement. Only afterwards did I realise that he was a she.

David Carr of the New York Times wrote last week about the increasing demands for “quote approval” from interviewees – the consequence of a system where people increasingly prefer to be interviewed via email.

That way they can choose their words, often with expert assistance, and don’t risk having their answers misquoted or being followed by the words “he said unconvincingly”. When there’s something to win, you want face time. When there’s something to lose, it’s email.

Email makes us crisp and professional, but it’s a defensive technique, a dead bat, a conversation-ender. Tom Hibbert hated it. Tom was the most effective star interviewer Smash Hits had. Tom’s big trick was to ask one question and then sit back and let the subject talk. They would eventually fill that silence with something worth writing down. – The Independent